Congratulations are in order for Rachel Crawford, a web liaison for the FAA’s Office of NextGen (ANG), in winning the 2023 Keller-Sullivan Award. An employee association sponsors this award. The National Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees with Disabilities (NCFAED) sponsors this award, recognizing an employee who goes above and beyond their expected responsibilities to achieve a unique FAA hiring, promotion, or advancement for those who struggle daily with a physical or mental disability.
In her job, Rachel ensures that the content on several hundred designated internal and external web pages meets FAA web standards and ANG content guidelines. As a project management lead for the Messaging and Updates Branch, Rachel also reviews content from electronic files, such as reports, infographics, presentations, and illustrations, ensuring they appropriately meet guidelines on accessibility and comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended.
Rachel takes her role seriously as an advocate for every employee to enjoy multimedia content as much as possible. She researches and learns how to create accessible content through her experience as a Visual Information Specialist and Content Editor. A refresh of external webpages (last year) and internal webpages (an up-and-coming project) allowed Rachel to ensure that the ANG organization is creating accessible electronic content on federal webpages and electronic files. Rachel uses every opportunity to broaden the reach of her message.
Knowing that accessibility requirements are—for many federal workers—something that is not always at the forefront of the content creation process. Rachel devised a comprehensive resource on the ANG internal webpage which includes background, summary guides, and job aids for content creators. [See link at end of article for some of Rachel’s work.] It contains tips from general content creation, to how to check compliance in specific computer programs - including social media. She also updated her curated resources as products evolved, such as when the FAA migrated to Office 365. During meetings with ANG web points of contact, Rachel routinely articulates the role that accessible content plays for people with disabilities (and how FAA employees and contractors can be a voice for an audience segment by creating accessible content).
Whenever ANG communication artifacts continued to be posted or approved without adequate checks for accessibility, Rachel developed and launched a professional quality Accessibility Lessons Series. Despite not having a background in Section 508 compliance or instructional systems design, Rachel deconstructed various learning objectives, sought best practices to teach, and packaged the goals into a one-hour webinar lesson by creating engaging content and real-life examples. On many slides, she created worksheets or sourced information from authoritative resources so learners could practice the tasks independently.
Nearly 200 employees and content support staff attended the initial Lesson, "General Knowledge" webinar on October 20, 2022 (as a personal nod to National Disability Employment Awareness Month). Nearly 100 employees attended an encore presentation on November 16th. Rachel delivered Lesson 2 on "How to Develop Alternative Text for Graphics," the following quarter, and about 100 employees attended. The attendance for these sessions rivaled other large-scale webinars that ANG organizes, such as the Tech Talk Tuesday monthly series, and it was the first time in recent memory that the organization sponsored training on accessible communications.
Rachel’s accessibility webinar series was so well received that she gained recognition from a representative from the FAA Office of Communications. At a subsequent community of practice gathering for FAA communications practitioners, they praised her series in front of more than 50 communicators across the agency, promoted follow-on lessons, and shared a link to her presentation contents, further increasing awareness and sharing her passion about the project. Attendees of the webinars also left flattering comments about the sessions, and her series received very positive feedback in post-training surveys.
At the end of fiscal year 2023, Rachel continues to work on another lesson for the series, and is consulting with content creators from the William J. Hughes Technical Center on applying accessibility considerations for content developed in Adobe InDesign and PDF software. She also plans to deliver training to an ANG branch on how to create content in Microsoft Word with accessibility factors in mind. Rachel is becoming widely recognized among ANG content creators as an advocate for and an expert in creating accessible electronic media. She has become an organizational resource to inform and advise more than 800 federal employees about the obligation to provide accessible communications. What is more laudable is that she was not hired as an expert in Section 508 compliance. Rachel has taken the initiative, on her own, to educate herself about the related topics and to share that knowledge with her coworkers. The improved communications products ANG disseminates push us toward a more inclusive work environment in supporting FAA employees with disabilities (as well as the general public) and genuinely reflects the spirit of the Keller-Sullivan Award. Congratulations Rachel!
To learn more about Rachel’s Accessibility Series, please visit Accessibility Lesson Series (faa.gov)
